Facebook down: Social network in a panic of the 'highest priority' as publishers silenced

Facebook confirms it is investigating with "the highest priority".

Facebook Pages appear to be offline for a slew of publishersReuters/Dado Ruvic

UPDATE: The outage has been resolved. Nick Wrenn, Facebook's head of news partnerships, tweeted roughly 5 hours after the issues emerged: "We should be back up and running now and new posts should publish as normal. Thanks again everyone for your patience while we fixed this."

Original article follows:

News outlets including IBTimes UK, The Guardian and HuffPost are currently unable to properly publish content to Facebook Pages, following a brief outage on Thursday (25 January).

Social media managers from major brands have said on Twitter that scheduled posts are failing to go live and those that do make it online are receiving no reach, or viewers.

Chris Moran, editor of strategic projects at the Guardian newspaper, said that Bloomberg and WalesOnline have also reported the same issues.

Nick Wrenn, Facebook's head of news partnerships, confirmed the website is investigating with the "highest priority". "Sorry for the inconvenience," he tweeted.

According to The Independent, videos appear to be working as normal and the majority of users are unlikely to be affected other than seeing a deficit of news.

The social network and its related mobile application, which boast more than two billion monthly active users, went offline on Thursday night. Frustrated users around the world, from South America to Europe, flocked to rival websites like Twitter to complain.

Facebook-owned photo sharing service Instagram was also impacted, officials said.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble connecting to Facebook and Instagram. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologise for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.

It remains unclear if the issues are linked to the prior downtime. In a major shake-up, the website is currently implementing algorithmic changes, designed to take power away from publishers who share content on the platform and focus more on users.